Under the Dragon (19 page)

‘Why are we so late leaving?’ I asked, hoping that my example might encourage others to complain, wishing that their private courage might become public. I should have saved my breath. Our fellow travellers looked away. The Burmese have a saying: ‘You can’t make oil from one grain of sesame seed.’

The conductor shrugged. He said nothing. The Lieutenant was watching him. He inspected our tickets and took note of our visa numbers. Then he retreated as the train approached its first stop, his sandals squeaking on the saturated floor. Again the cry went up, the shutters came down and the
thingyan
water-throwers splashed the carriages. Our soaking would be repeated in every town and village throughout the journey.

It had only been in the last few weeks that tourists had been allowed to travel to Lashio again. There had been a real danger of attack from insurgent groups before the recent ceasefire agreements. A grinning woman offered us damp crispies while gazing at Katrin’s pale skin. Two brothers asked to look at our passports and held them in their hands in wonder.

‘You have seen Alaska?’ asked the older man. He shook his head in awe. ‘I have always wished to see snow.’

But the Lieutenant paid us no heed, dividing his attention between a comic book and the bored boy soldier who wandered into the carriage to report to him. The young man carried his rifle like a cricket bat. He never met our eyes.

An hour into the journey the train began to climb a switchback zig-zag of track, snaking back and forth up into the Shan Hills. Marco Polo described these uplands as ‘vast jungles teeming with elephants, unicorns and other beasts’. We saw no animals, but did catch sight of the Burma Road and the heavy trucks nearing the end of their journey from western Yunnan in China. The isolated Shan State occupies a quarter of Burma’s geographic area, and for thirty years its high forests provided a safe haven for the world’s greatest variety of ethnic militias. But since 1988 a thousand villages have been relocated or destroyed by the
Tatmadaw
, and over half a million people are estimated to have been forced to leave their homes. The Shans call themselves
Tai
, meaning ‘free’, and their passion for independence has kept them disunited from their Thai relations, and allowed them to be subjugated by Rangoon.

Above Maymyo, the hill station built by the British as a cool retreat from the heat of the central plains, thick jungle foliage pressed in along the narrow rail corridor. The boughs of trees whipped into the open windows. The carriage swung hard to the left and a branch slapped me in the face.

Every few miles the jungle opened out onto lush clearings of clean houses and orderly fields. Fat water-buffaloes wallowed in mud pools and villagers planted neat rows of rice. Farmers tended to smallholdings with handmade watering cans fashioned from old oil canisters. We caught sight of wheat fields and orange groves across the uplands. The train stopped often, waiting at stations for a longer time than it took to run between them. Townspeople strolled up and down the carriages looking for passing friends. Hawkers balanced on their heads trays of tiny strawberries, thin roast chicken legs and squat bunches of bananas. The Lieutenant stepped away to speak to another soldier and the brothers leaned forward to whisper to us, ‘And have you met the Lady?’ They fell silent when he returned, armed with a pink plastic water-pistol. He proceeded along the length of the carriage, spraying each passenger with squirts of water. His was a private, sinister New Year’s celebration. When he reached us he hesitated for a moment, then sprayed us too. After an eternity the locomotive’s whistle sounded, the train shuddered forward and the wild vegetation closed in again around the line, cutting us off from the white-hot light.

The future for Burma ended on 19 July 1947. The Burmese had been calling for independence from British rule since the start of the century, and a young law student named Aung San rose to become the leader of the movement. He and twenty-nine fellow nationalists, known as the Thirty Comrades, underwent military training in Japan and accompanied the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1941. They saw British misfortune as their opportunity, until the Japanese broke their promise of Burmese autonomy. Aung San switched allegiance to support the Allies in expelling the invaders. A devastating conflict followed. Sixty per cent of all Japanese soldiers who died in the Second World War died in Burma. The country’s infrastructure was ruined, and would remain unmodernised – as was proved by our rickety railway – for more than half a century. But Aung San and his comrades survived the war, and he alone was considered capable of leading the nation. Then, on 19 July 1947, not long after he had negotiated independence from Britain, he was assassinated.

The Burmese can be classified into four major linguistic groups – the Burmans, the Shan, the Karen and the Mon-Khmer. This kaleidoscope of peoples has clashed over the centuries, usually at times of Burman expansion. During the colonial era the British ruled in part by exploiting ethnic differences. Aung San, a member of the country’s majority, was able to transcend the minorities’ historical mistrust of Burman politicians. That trust – and the ethnic leaders’ faith in a just union – died with him.

In 1948 the new Union of Burma attained independence without the leadership or vision to sustain it. Civil war erupted within months, Mandalay fell to Karen rebels and communist insurgents laid siege to Rangoon. As many as thirty-five guerrilla armies declared war on the new administration. Railway tracks and riverboats were attacked daily, bridges were demolished, the economy floundered. Government forces fought to drive the rebels back into the hills, and despite the violence, a tenuous democracy survived in those parts of the country under central control. Regular elections were held. A free press flourished. Until 1962, when General Ne Win, the chief of the army, seized control.

Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council suspended the constitution. All basic human rights were usurped. The
Tatmadaw
was instructed to eliminate insurgent groups. Striking students were shot. The army took control of the civil administration and doubled its size. The Council’s xenophobic, inept ideology, ‘the Burmese Way to Socialism’, ruined the country, cutting it off from the outside world until the dictator came to realise that trade and tourism could further enrich him. It was Ne Win’s sham resignation which had given the people hope in 1988, and his calculated orders which had led to their massacre.

After thirty-five years of military misrule, Ne Win’s only achievement had been to end the civil war with the rebel armies. ‘The
Tatmadaw
crushes the enemies of the Union,’ declared the
New Light of Myanmar
, ‘and promotes unity and friendship among national brethren.’ The government-controlled press claimed that the insurgent groups had entered ‘the legal fold’. Yet the ceasefires had not come about because of conclusive peace talks or a crushing military defeat, rather because of the wish of the former adversaries to cooperate in more profitable ventures. Between 1989 and 1995 the SLORC increased its military stranglehold over the country through $1.4 billion worth of arms deals with China. As well as through soft loans, the contracts were believed to have been financed by the profits of opium and heroin trafficking.

By nightfall we were still not halfway to Lashio. The train drowsed for an hour or two in a beggarly village without electricity. The carriage lights failed and candles were lit. The conductor wandered off into the night. Katrin slept and woke and fell asleep again.

In time the Express shuffled on. Across the valleys slash-and-burn scrub fires ran crimson lines up the steep hills, casting the railside banana groves into dancing, blood-red silhouettes. The brothers asked again to see our passports. At the next town the mosquitoes returned. It was near midnight when we arrived in Lashio. It had taken us eighteen hours to travel the 150 miles from Mandalay. I collected our bag from the overhead rack. The Lieutenant stood up and pointed at me. ‘You have the look of a journalist,’ he said in impeccable English. He left the carriage before I could find the words to express my anger.

As the other travellers fought for seats on the town bus we hired a whole pick-up. For one dollar it raced us through the unlit streets to the modern Lashio Motel. Twenty more dollars bought us a cool room, hot water and a firm double bed. There was a spittoon in the corner and
Baywatch
on Star TV. I felt drained. Katrin cried in the shower, washing the stench of the journey out of her hair. Ni Ni was dead, Ma Swe homeless, the trishaw Indian ate a bowl of plain rice for supper and the brothers on the train would never see snow. It was unjust and selfish, but I wanted the comfort and ease that money could afford. I did not want us too to suffer from the despotic evil. On the state-controlled BBS news a graduate class of officer cadets dressed in crisp white uniforms paraded around a mock-up of a golden pagoda. Then a Burmese fashion model skipped across a dirty beach to advertise Feeling Beverly Hills deodorant spray. We ate imported Laughing Cow processed cheese for supper and fell asleep expecting the Lieutenant’s knock on the door.

If Mandalay had felt like a border town, then Lashio seemed to be deep in the next country. It wasn’t a Burmese city, or for that matter Shan. It had the atmosphere of a highland trading bazaar in western Yunnan, even though the Chinese frontier lay over a hundred miles away to the north. We awoke not to the chants of Pali formulas but to the sound of canned ‘Canto-pop’. The roar of heavy Hino transports, down-gearing on their long drive south from China, rather than the chime of bicycle bells disturbed our breakfast. The restaurant’s laser karaoke bar was a popular destination for businessmen from Kunming. On its wide-screen television our Yunnanese waiter watched Pekingese performers act out a Ming Dynasty melodrama,
In Search of the West
. A Black & White whisky box lay discarded on the stage. More than half of Lashio’s residents were Han Chinese. Ten years before they had numbered fewer than 10 per cent of the city’s population. Lashio had always been one of the great trading posts on the Burma Road. The newcomers had flooded in to take advantage of its strategic position – and the political opportunity.

We set out to find our basket and, instead of the morning market, stumbled onto a building site. Clouds of cement dust billowed over the town. Builders swarmed up scaffolding and along walls, carrying bricks and pallets of plaster. All around us was the racket of hammering and sifting soil, chipping rocks and crying birds. The old Shan town hall had been demolished. The Anglican church seemed to have vanished. The marketplace was being replaced by a concrete emporium.

We skirted the piles of gravel, watching browbeaten Burmans scurry through the site with heads bowed. None of them paused to splash us with water. The confident Chinese residents stocked the shelves of their stores and did deals in noodle shops. They alone seemed to appreciate the town’s rush to modernity. For our part, we became aware of a paradox. I had returned to Burma in the hope of discovering why my first visit had moved me. I had not expected to find the country living in the past, as Ne Win’s naïve isolationist policies had been discarded, yet I had hoped that certain traditions and standards would still remain at the heart of the society. It shocked us to discover that, starting in Lashio, Burma was selling its future to finance the present. In the process, it was becoming a Chinese colony.

In the Chinese mini-markets we found Crest toothpaste, Californian prunes and Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut bars. There were bottles of Veuve Clicquot and Unipart oil filters. No one with dollars went without in Lashio, except for us. We could find no bamboo baskets for sale, only garish plastic carrier bags.

Our search had begun to obsess me. It had become heightened by frustration, as well as infected with the indigenous, jumbled madness. Katrin tried to soothe my disappointment, suggesting that we take in the Quan Yin San Temple, the largest Chinese shrine in Burma. We climbed up through the heat and noise of the town to its dragon-peaked entrance arch. Women in trousers lit joss-sticks and kow-towed to snarling, wrathful Buddhas. Girls wearing frilly Western dresses chased each other around the heavy, sweep-roofed building. The shrine’s brash, busy activity seemed to have little in common with the contemplative peace of Burmese Theravada Buddhist temples.

In the temple forecourt the faithful crowded around a pair of ceremonial furnaces. They jostled each other aside to throw into the flames miniature houses, furniture and televisions fashioned from folded paper. A serious young man dropped a perfect, tiny, cardboard Mercedes Benz into the fire and watched its smoke rise into the sky. It was believed that ancestors rewarded their living relatives’ offerings with real houses, televisions and cars.

‘We should make a paper basket,’ suggested Katrin, ripping three pages out of my notebook. She tore them into strips and wove a simple base. Then she bent the elements into an upright position and, working from left to right, twisted them around to fashion a crude border. ‘Now we can have our own
kong tek
ceremony,’ she said, and threw her handiwork into the furnace.

I decided to make more practical use of the flames. I write notes when travelling which, at the end of every day, are transcribed into my journal. In most countries the original jottings are then dropped into a wastepaper bin. But where does one dispose of honesty in a dictatorship? Certainly not in a public place or in a hotel room. The notes could easily have been retrieved and read. Toilets had seemed the obvious answer, but the Burmese are discouraged from discarding any paper in such a manner. The country’s drains were in such a state of disrepair that I had imagined my scribblings bringing Rangoon – and me – to an unpleasant, incriminating standstill. So since the beginning of our trip the scraps of paper had been stuffed into my pockets. In Pagan I had tried tearing each leaf into minute scraps and dropping them off the back of the horse-cart, only to find myself leaving a Hansel and Gretel trail in the dust. Next I attempted throwing them out of bus and train windows, but no matter how isolated the chosen spot, children appeared out of nowhere to gather them. In the Quan Yin San Temple I recognised a rare opportunity. In one movement I emptied the old notes out of my pockets and dumped them into the furnace. A great whoosh of flames caught them and carried their smoky thoughts towards the heavens.